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Puppet Shaheen: Loyal mouthpiece for Obamacare

On Oct. 15, 2009, Jeanne Shaheen stood in the U.S. Senate as someone placed behind her a sign headed “HEALTH REFORM REALITY CHECK.” She said she had risen to “dispel some of those myths” about the Affordable Care Act.

“Now, under the current legislation, everyone will have the freedom to keep their health care plan if they like it,” she assured viewers. Two minutes later, she repeated the claim, saying, “You can keep your insurance if you like it.”

In case her point was not clear, the sign behind her featured a checklist under the word “TRUTH,” and the first checked item read: “keep your insurance if you like it.”

This was two months after she said in a telephone town hall meeting (which The Daily Caller dug up last week), “if you have health coverage that you like you can keep it.” She insisted that she would not have supported the bill without that guarantee, adding, “one of the things I said as a requirement that I have for supporting a bill is that if you have health coverage that you like you should be able to keep that.”

Yet in July of 2010, Senate Republicans pointed out that Health and Human Services rules forced people to drop their existing coverage if only minor changes were made to it by their insurers. Shaheen, who said she would not support the law unless people could keep their coverage, voted against a GOP measure to change those rules so people could keep their existing coverage. On Monday our senior political reporter John DiStaso asked Shaheen about that vote. Just as she did back in 2009, she spewed the talking points of the day. “One of the things that I think was important about the health care law was that it increased the coverage that plans would provide to people. For everybody, there is a floor on how much can be eliminated from your health insurance.”

What breathtaking dishonesty. Notice how different the new talking point is from the one four years ago. With the knowledge that Obamacare has already caused hundreds of thousands of Americans to lose their coverage, Shaheen does not even try to claim that you can still keep your insurance if you like it. She blindly repeats the new White House line: The coverage you’re going to get is better.

We hope that the senator we’re going to get in 2014 is better. New Hampshire is ill-served by Shaheen, who lets herself be used as a dissembling puppet by a fundamentally dishonest White House.